Some 132 children are among the hostages seized on Wednesday at a school in the southern Russian republic of North Ossetia, the Itar-Tass said, quoting officials of the crisis management center.

 

The officials said the figure has been compiled after parents and relatives helped specify the numbers of pupils who went into the school on the first day of the academic year early Wednesday morning.

 

The report did not say how many adults are being held.

 

Earlier, North Ossetian Interior Ministry spokesman, Ismel Shaov, said that up to 150 people are being held hostage by the attackers.

 

Up to 30 attackers with explosive belts and guns stormed the school in the town of Beslan as a large number of parents were bringing their children to a ceremony marking the start of the new school year.

 

Itar-Tass said seven people who were wounded when the raid began died of their wounds in hospitals that brought the figure of killed civilians up to eight. In addition, at least one rebel was killed in a gunfight with police in the early stages of the seizure.

 

The North Ossetian health ministry, however, denied the report, saying four people were killed and ten others were wounded.

 

Russia has called for convening an immediate UN Security Council meeting following the school hostage-taking crisis.

 

"This session could take place in several hours, when it is nighttime in Moscow," Andrei Denisov, Russian Permanent Representative to the UN, told Russian television.

 

 

(Xinhua News Agency September 2, 2004)